1. Greenhouse states that Justice Ginsburg had taken note of the lower number of women clerks. Ginsburg ought to have a keener understanding of the consequences of nondiscriminatory merit-based selection and random variation. In her 1993 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, it was learned, much to Ginsburg’s visible embarrassment, that in her 13 years on the D.C. Circuit she had never had a single black law clerk, intern, or secretary. Out of 57 employees, zero blacks.

2. Evidently eager to take a whack at Justice Scalia, Greenhouse resorts to blog comments to pass along someone’s speculation that Scalia “could not find enough conservative women to meet his test of ideological purity.” What “test of ideological purity”? As Greenhouse ought to know, Scalia regularly hires liberal clerks. Indeed, I would bet that the number of liberal clerks that he has hired exceeds the number of conservative clerks that Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer—combined—have hired.